Installation

Ablebase is distributed as a monorepo with a Docker Compose configuration that starts all required services. You can also run each service manually for local development.

Prerequisites

Docker and Docker Compose v2, or Node.js 20+ and pnpm 9+
A PostgreSQL 16 database (provided automatically by Docker Compose)

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/Ablebase/ablebase.git
cd ablebase

Create environment files (see Configuration):

cp packages/api/.env.example packages/api/.env
# edit packages/api/.env with your values

Start all services:
Terminal window
```
docker compose up
```
This starts:
- PostgreSQL 16 on port 5432
- API on port 3001
- Web (Caddy) on port 80
Open http://localhost in your browser.

Service	Port	Description
`db`	5432	PostgreSQL 16
`api`	3001	Hono REST API
`web`	80	React SPA behind Caddy reverse proxy

All /api/* requests from the web are proxied to the API by Caddy.

Option 2 — Manual (local development)

Install dependencies:
Terminal window
```
pnpm install
```
Start a local PostgreSQL instance (or point DATABASE_URL at an existing one).

Create packages/api/.env with at minimum:

DATABASE_URL=postgresql://user:password@localhost:5432/ablebase
BETTER_AUTH_SECRET=<output of: openssl rand -base64 32>
BETTER_AUTH_URL=http://localhost:5173
ALLOW_SIGNUP=true

Run database migrations:
Terminal window
```
pnpm --filter @ablebase/api db:migrate
```

Start the API and web app in separate terminals:

# terminal 1
pnpm --filter @ablebase/api dev

# terminal 2
pnpm --filter @ablebase/web dev

Open http://localhost:5173 in your browser.

On first startup, navigate to /signup to create the initial account. Your first organization is created automatically after sign-up.

Migrations

Database migrations run automatically at API startup. To skip this (e.g. in CI) set SKIP_MIGRATIONS=1. To run migrations manually:

pnpm --filter @ablebase/api db:migrate